“... kindly. One famous proclamation (reproduced in Lawson’s book) was issued in 1830 by Governor George Arthur in comic-strip form, and showed, in its last frame, an Englishman being hanged for shooting a native (though there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that this ever happened). The problem was that Britain didn’t have the means to enforce ...”

“... travesties of justice – notably the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, which gave birth to the #BlackLivesMatter movement – alongside many more ambiguous affronts (such as the lack of nominees of colour at the 2015 Academy Awards, which gave birth to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign), the rapturous, impossibly ...”

“... of particular places’. The exhibition includes several such pictures, watercolours by Sandby, Michael Angelo Rooker and others, beautiful but somehow small-minded, limited in their ambition, we are invited to believe. Eventually, however, in the early 19th century, topographical art was transcended by something infinitely more serious and more powerful, a ...”

“... where Christians have a huge impact on public policy’ – presumably, therefore, God agrees with George Bush’s tearing up of the Kyoto Protocol and is in favour of bespattering Alaska with oil wells. Furthermore, according to Mr Leach, EU integration runs ‘counter to a Biblical model’, for apparently ‘Biblical government is minimal ...”

“... arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural ...”

“... said to the press, ‘he was out because I said he was out.’Klem died in 1951. Four years later, George Retzlaff, a producer on the TV show Hockey Night in Canada, used a kinescope to produce the first replay of a goal, but the video took some time to edit so was only ready to be shown later in the match. It was another eight years before Tony ...”

“... historic station’s access to the rail network and keep intact more of the structures designed by George Stephenson, the engineer who built the Liverpool & Manchester. But Whitby’s route, apart from costing £20 million more, would run through, and interfere with, a project on a long-derelict piece of land, Middlewood Locks, where the state-owned Beijing ...”

“... from this perspective.’ He concludes his essay on Hooker with a ‘C of E Rules OK’ verse from George Herbert’s poem, ‘The British Church’ – perhaps the only one of Herbert’s poems in English wherein he failed to subdue his tribal pride. By ‘Anglican’ Sisson means ‘English’. The Welsh, Scots and Irish may, perhaps, be permitted to eat the ...”

“... that Calvinist strand in Protestantism which sees all human creativity and thought as depraved. As George Herbert wrote, ‘We say amiss/This or that is:/Thy word is all, if we could scan.’ This indeed results in ‘self-consuming artefacts’, poems which must end in pious self-cancellation, or literary valedictions such as Herbert’s ‘Jordan’ or ...”

“... of copies were printed and distributed to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the ...”

“... union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say: If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his father. But their consequences need not be taken so ...”

“... Friday, 31 January 1919, when troops and tanks stood by to quell a mass rally, in Glasgow’s George Square, of West of Scotland workers campaigning for a forty-hour week, the event was remembered in the People’s Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as ...”

“... pardons or commutations had not applied to the Department of Justice for clemency. On 2 July 2007, George W. Bush commuted the prison sentence on Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice-President Cheney. Libby had been convicted the previous March of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of the CIA agent Valerie ...”

“... catalogue of 1796, calls it Study of a Black Man’s Head, and the painting’s first owner, Sir George Beaumont, who had known both Johnson and Reynolds, asserted that it was a portrait of Reynolds’s black servant. There are a number of later copies or versions of the painting, one attributed to Reynolds’s pupil and amanuensis, James Northcote. These ...”

“... George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations ...”